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How to suppress women’s filmmaking

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How to suppress women’s filmmaking

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Content Deitch 1

HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN’S FILMMAKING
by
Hannah Deitch

____________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS)
August 2017

Copyright 2017 Hannah Deitch
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Acknowledgements

Thank you first and foremost to Sasha Anawalt for her tremendous guidance and support not
only for my thesis, but also for everything else—I feel incredibly grateful to have Sasha on my
team. I also want to thank Josh Kun for encouraging my thesis from its fragile early stages and
helping me shape it into something worthy. Thank you to Kenneth Turan for your wisdom and
support along the way. A special thanks to the other incredible professors I’ve encountered this
year at USC—Howard Rosenberg and Bonnie Bruckheimer—who emboldened my confidence
and went out of their way to encourage me to keep writing. Tim Page was an unforgettable
mentor—thank you for your insight, your wisdom, and your kindness. Tim always gave his
students his all, even while suffering through a health crisis. A special thanks as well to Manohla
Dargis, Stephanie Zacharek, Melissa Silverstein, Karen Ward Mahar, and Geetha Ramanathan
for your long and lively discussions—conversations I will not soon forget. I would also like to
thank Mike Ploszek and Alison Wolfe for their thesis guidance. Last but not least, I have to
thank my parents—Jerri and Rick Deitch—for being there for me every step of the way, and for
being incredible feminists in their own right.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 2
Abstract 4
Introduction: Who Determines Who’s Important? 5
Early Cinema 14
The Duvernnay-Treverrow Test 26
Ad Feminam 31
Conclusion 35
Bibliography 39

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Abstract

When feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ published “How to Suppress Women’s
Writing” in 1983, she outlined—with scrupulous detail and biting wit—all the ways in which
women’s writing has been systematically erased or ignored from history. This thesis aims to
sketch a similar inquiry for women’s filmmaking. The law is democratic—anyone can pick a
camera, man or woman. So how do we map the largely invisible cultural phenomenon of
suppressing women’s filmmaking? By erasing women’s contributions from textbooks, excluding
them from all-male filmmaking clubs, re-branding or dismissing their work as marginal, and
ignoring them in film criticism, the long and storied history of women’s filmmaking is largely
unknown to mainstream culture. This thesis exhumes those women filmmakers, and uncovers
how these women were buried in the first place.

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Introduction | Who Determines Who’s Important?

“You can’t be a director. You’re a woman.”

Martha Coolidge received this bald dismissal from an interviewer when she applied for NYU
graduate film school in the late sixties. The lack of known female filmmakers was taken as gospel,
and as evidence of women’s inability to direct.

“He said, ‘you can’t name five women directors in the world.’ And of course I couldn’t, because
in the cinema study classes I had, nobody taught anything about women at all,” Coolidge recalls
in Rachel Abramowitz’s, Is That a Gun In Your Pocket?, a nonfiction account of female power in
Hollywood. “I didn’t even know about Ida Lupino. But I did know Agnes Varda. We talked, and
I got in.”
1

Coolidge went on to make Valley Girl (1983), under the condition that she show women’s naked
breasts four times in the movie. She had a budget of $350,000, and the film made $17 million. She
is the only woman to have served as President of the Directors Guild of America.

In cinema—and elsewhere—what’s written down is what counts, and what’s accepted is history.
There are no legal barriers that prevent women from making films. But prohibition is not the only
way to curtail women’s creative output.

1
Rachel Abramowitz, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: Women's Experience of Power in Hollywood (Random
House, 2000), 179.
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In her 1983 nonfiction book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, renowned science fiction author
Joanna Russ explains the social forces which hinder widespread acknowledgement and
canonization of women’s writing. While white, male authors are romanticized as “geniuses,”
women are belittled, dismissed, ignored.

“I remember, as a first-year student, being asked cheerfully by my graduate date how I, an aspiring
novelist, could reconcile my ambition to write with the ‘fact’ that no woman had every produced
‘great literature,’” Russ recalls.
2

She didn’t write it.
She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have.
She wrote it, but look what she wrote about.
She wrote, but ‘she’ isn’t really an artist and ‘it’ isn’t really serious, of the right genre –
i.e., really art.
She wrote it, but she only wrote one of it.
She wrote it, but it’s only interesting/included in the canon for one, limited reason.
She wrote it, but there are very few of her.
- Joanna Russ summarizes the ways women’s writing is systemically suppressed
3

2
Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing (University of Texas Press, 1983), 90.
3
Russ, 76.
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The logic of “if women can do it, why haven’t they?” is a powerful deterrent, a huge—if logically
fallacious—burden that all women filmmakers take on when they pick up the camera, despite the
fact that women have been making films—great films—since the beginning.

In writing, and in filmmaking, women authors—or auteurs—are pushed to the margins. Films
do not have authors in the straightforward way that novels do, yet the romantic vocabulary of the
lone artist has been appropriated by cinema. When we talk about films, we usually talk about
them as the song of a solo performer—the director—not a chorus. This trend pre-dates the 1950s,
but its endurance in movie criticism can be attributed to the legacy of the auteur theory, which
was popularized in the postwar era by the French critics and aspiring filmmakers like Claude
Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard at the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and
brought to American shores by disciples like Andrew Sarris. The auteur theory helped elevate
film’s status as popular entertainment to the upper echelons of high art.

“Whether or not we use the word auteur, we talk about films as being made by specific individuals,
rather than as an industrial product made with industrial conditions—made by committee or made
by producer,” said Manohla Dargis, co-chief film critic at the New York Times.
4

A quick google of “auteurs” will produce names like Scorsese, Hitchcock, Tarantino, Wes
Anderson—these are directors whose movies are discussed as the latest installment of a trusted
author, conferring a certain degree of artistic authority and quality right off the bat.

4
Manohla Dargis, interview by Hannah Deitch, November 13, 2016.
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“A lot of mainstream critics think of auteurs as being kind of sanctioned,” said Dargis. “An auteur
is someone who’s going to get an Academy Award, or an auteur is someone who makes art movies.
It’s a word you use in certain circumstances and certain festivals.”
5

Describing a filmmaker as an “auteur” has become a shorthand for “visionary,” celebrating
directors whose uncompromising style and personality manages to prevail over the sanitizing
efforts of Hollywood machinery. But for every critic or movie-buff who identifies as an auteur
theory acolyte, there is an equally devout anti-auteurist. For example, some take issue with auteur
theory because it punishes directors who have a diverse body of work. Authorship is the effusion
of a vision—not a homogenizing signature to be rooted out film by film. Whether the anti-
auteurists are champions of the screenwriter or simply suspicious of the theory’s reductive
romanticism, none is more famous than former New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who Sarris
once referred to as a “lady critic with a lively sense of outrage.”
6
In her famous essay “Circles and
Squares,” Kael makes it clear that her beef is not with directors who buck the system, but with
critics who use theory as a way of doing film criticism.

I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other
experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are
eclectic. But this does not mean a scrambling and confusion of systems. Eclecticism
is not the same as lack of scruple; eclecticism is the selection of the best standards

5
Manohla Dargis, interview by Hannah Deitch, November 13, 2016.
6
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.,
1968).
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and principles from various systems of ideas. It requires more care, more orderliness
to be a pluralist than to apply a single theory.
7

Buried at the end of this essay is one of her most incisive critiques—the auteur theory’s
valorization of virility and masculinity. Most critics of the theory focus on its logistical
shortsightedness—how can a film have one author when there are so many essential contributors
on set? But for Kael, auteur theory is also inextricable from masculinity.

The auteur critics are so enthralled with their narcissistic male fantasies…that they
seem unable to relinquish their schoolboy notions of human experience. (If there
are any female practitioners of auteur criticism, I have not yet discovered them). Can
we conclude that, in England and the United States, the auteur theory is an attempt
by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood
and adolescence—that period when masculinity looked so great and important but
art was something talked about by poseurs and phonies and sensitive-feminine
types?
8

In other words, it is the “maleness” of directors that is being celebrated—the image of the hyper
masculine director-general or the exceptional genius, both of which are coded as “male.” Google
“auteur” and there’s nary a woman in the lot.

7
Pauline Kael, “Circles and Squares,” Film Quarterly 16, no. 3 (Spring 1963).
8
Ibid.
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Auteurs are supposed to be “geniuses”—a label that’s rarely applied to women. A recent study
from Cornell researcher Kristen Elmore and Myra Luna-Lucero from Columbia University sought
to uncover whether perceptions of inventions were shaped by their description.
9
Their findings
showed that men were more likely to be thought of as geniuses, even when women accomplished
the same task. Science may be wildly different from film in many ways, but they’re similar in at
least one respect: men often get the credit for women’s achievements.

“The good version of the theory is an auteur is an artist who is somehow transcending the
commercial constraints of the medium and actually imposing a voice,” said Dargis. “The bad
version is that auteur theory is the ‘great man theory’ of history. But does it have to be?”

It doesn’t have to be. Film critics and scholars have done an excellent job of rousing cults of
personality around the Hitchcocks, Hawks, and Tarantinos, and popular culture has largely been
seduced by their testerone-driven cabal. Women filmmakers have been left to the forgotten attic
of history, but under the cobwebs is a rich minefield of work that deserve attention not just for the
purposes of inclusion, but because many of these women fundamentally changed the art of
filmmaking.

“The real scandal of auteur theory lay not so much in glorifying directors as the equivalent of
prestige to literary authors, but rather in who exactly was granted this prestige,” said Robert Stam
in Film Theory: An Introduction.
10

9
K. C. Elmore and M. Luna-Lucero, “Light Bulbs or Seeds? How Metaphors for Ideas Influence Judgments About
Genius,” Social Psychological and Personality Science, October 2016.
10
Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), 84.
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The short answer to “who” is men. A quick flip through the National Society of Film Critics’ 100
Essential Films yields only two films by women: Dorothy Arzner’s Dance Girl Dance (1940) and
Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993).
11
Have women really only produced 2% of the world’s essential
films? Or does that bleak estimate say more about the maleness of film criticism than it does the
artistic value of women’s filmmaking output?

“With auteur, I think male,” said Melissa Silverstein, who runs the popular gender diversity blog
Women & Hollywood. “We elevate some people to be thought of as better storytellers than others,
and the people who get elevated are the men.”
12

Film inherited the same double standard of content as literature, where work about women’s
experiences is dismissed as narrow and specific, while men’s experiences and suffering are thought
of as universal. Russ quotes Virginia Woolf, who describes how critics devalue women’s stories:
“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant
book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is
more important than a scene in a shop.”
13

Sometimes the fact of the woman’s authorship is enough to dismiss the subject matter altogether.
Elaine Showalter calls this phenomenon ad feminam.
14
When Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was

11
Jay Carr, ed., The A List: The National Society of Film Critics' 100 Essential Films (Da Capo Press, 2002).
12
Melissa Silverstein, interview by Hannah Deitch, November 23, 2016.
13
Russ, 41.
14
Russ 27.
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published—originally under the pseudonym Currer Bell—critics “bluntly admitted that they
thought the book was a masterpiece if written by a man, shocking or disgusting if written by a
woman.”
15
Hence masculine pen names were the norm among female authors for decades. In
perhaps the most famous example, Mary Anne Evans published Middlemarch under the
pseudonym “George Eliot” to ensure her novel would receive fair judgment from critics who
might otherwise be distracted by the fact that she was a woman. Even today, many popular
female authors opt to go by their initials--J.K. Rowling, to name a famous example—to obscure
their femininity.

With this unconscious bias in mind, the author Catherine Nichols embarked on a little experiment,
which she describes in a 2015 essay for Jezebel. She sent a query letter to 50 literary agents under
her own name, and yielded only two requests for the manuscript. Under a male pseudonym,
however, the same letter earned her 17 responses. This male alter ego was “eight and a half times
better than me at writing the same book,” said Nichols.
16

So how does our culture begin to tackle this bias? First, we have to recognize that the “objective”
categories of importance, greatness, and genius that critics so freely apply to men are not objective
at all.

15
Russ 27.
16
Catherine Nichols, “Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name,” Jezebel,
August 4, 2015.
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“Women filmmakers are not going to become important unless you make them important,” said
Dargis. “I would say Agnès Varda is just as important as Godard and Truffaut…but also we have
to ask ourselves what does ‘important’ mean? Who determines who’s important?”

The short answer, again, is men. For Dargis, Agnès Varda perfectly illustrates the phenomenon
of elevating male filmmakers at the expense of women. The style and themes of Varda’s film La
pointe courte (1955) predates the French New Wave films of Claude Chabrol, François
Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard.

“Agnès Varda is not part of the Cahiers du Cinéma” said Dargis. “But she makes her feature first.
She’s the first one. She’s an auteur before Godard and Truffaut.”

But most film history courses, unless they are specifically about gender, teach Godard and Truffaut
before Varda. In fact, a casual perusal of the most popular film history texts and course syllabi
reveals almost no women at all. In the most recent edition of Bordwell & Thompson’s Film
History: An Introduction—the most widely-taught film history textbook—most of the big women
directors are not mentioned at all, and the ones who are receive only a few sentences of attention.

“I asked my classes: how many of you can name a male film director? And almost all of them
could,” said Geetha Ramanathan, a gender and film history professor at West Chester University
who wrote Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films, one of the few books specializing in the
Deitch 14

subject. “Then I asked the same thing for female directors. About five or six students were able
to.”
17

The names they came up with were Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, and Angelina Jolie.

+++++

Early Cinema

Women have been making films since the dawn of its invention. In 1896, a French secretary named
Alice Guy (later Alice Guy-Blaché) went to her boss Léon Gaumont, one of the pioneers of the
motion picture industry alongside the Lumière brothers, and asked for permission to make a film.
Up until this point, most short films were purely for demonstrations, capturing scenes like an
arriving train or employees exiting a factory to show off the new camera technology—these were
called “actualities.” Guy-Blaché wanted to tell a story.

“In the beginning, everyone was always shooting street scenes, parades or moving
trains, which I did not find terribly interesting. So one day I said to Monsieur
Gaumont: ‘It seems to me we could do something better.’ Gaumont and Lumière
were both inventors, and they were not interested in developing new possibilities.
They were content with their technical achievement. Gaumont said to me: ‘OK…if
you would like to…it’s a young girl’s thing! You want to make a film. You want to do

17
Geetha Ramanathan, interview by Hannah Deitch, October 28, 2016.

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something. Have you written a story?’ ‘Yes, I can write a story; I think I’m capable of
doing something.’” — Alice Guy-Blaché’s account of creating her first film from her
memoir
18

By the age of 23, Alice Guy-Blaché made her first film, La fee aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy)
by May of 1896.
19
Early film history is hazy—lost archives and mislabeled film reels make it
difficult to pin down a definitive account. Lumière, Guy-Blaché, and Georges Méliès have all
been credited as the first to make a fiction film. Lumière had screened his 45-second comedy
L’Arroseur arrosé on December 28, 1895, where Méliès—the famous French director of A Trip
to the Moon who is sometimes credited with making the first fiction film—was in attendance.
20

But according to her memoirs, the idea she proposed to Gaumont was entirely novel—there is
great evidence to suggest that the first author of film is a woman. Barbara Koenig-Quart calls her
“the inventor of the film that tells a story.”
21

“What [Guy-Blaché] proposed did not yet exist,” reports Joan Simon in Alice Guy-Blaché: Cinema
Pioneer. “At the time Gaumont saw motion-picture filmmaking as an adjunct to selling cameras,
and the thought of projected motion pictures being a commercial endeavor as popular
entertainment was not yet on the horizon.”
22

18
Joan Simon, ed., Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer (Yale University Press, 2009), 5.
19
Ibid., 5
20
Alison McMahan, Alice Guy-Blaché : Lost Visionary of the Cinema (Bloomsbury iBook, 2014), 117.
21
Barbara Koenig Quart, Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema (Praeger Publishers, 1988), 19.
22
Simon, 10
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Guy-Blaché was also one of the first (if not the first – again, this chronology is impossible to report
with perfect accuracy) to develop film production as an organized, industrial process – prior to
Guy-Blaché, most films were the work of a single person and machine. Guy-Blaché hired and
oversaw assistants like set designers, actors, and writers and “with one almighty stroke, she had
created an entire early French film industry.”
23
Her film Envies (1906) might also represent the
first use of a dramatic close-up in film, though for many years that credit was given to D. W.
Griffiths for his film After Many Years (1908).
24

Guy-Blaché went on to make hundreds more films and even found her own production company,
Solax, in New Jersey in 1912.
25
Here she was known for her “intrepid behavior, burning cars for
effects, having characters hang from bridges, using a tigress.”
26
A decade later, Guy-Blaché
divorced her husband Herbert Blaché, left her company, and returned to France.
27
But after so
many years away, she was a forgotten face to the French film industry and struggled to find work.
At the time of her death in 1968, Guy-Blaché believed only three of her films were still in
existence. Most of the directing and producing credits for her films were “falsely assigned to her
co-workers and her name, unintentionally or purposefully, was omitted from the histories of
French and American film.”
28
It was not until the late 70s that many of her films were unearthed
in mislabeled or orphaned archives.
29

23
Quart, 19
24
McMahan, 184.
25
Simon, 17
26
Quart 19.
27
Simon, 19
28
Quart 19.
29
Simon, 19
Deitch 17

In the most recent edition of Bordwell & Thompson’s introductory Film History textbook, released
in 2010, Guy-Blaché is named correctly as the “first female filmmaker,” though the text makes no
mention that she is one of the earliest known filmmaker to create a “story” film.
30

For years it was Edwin S. Porter who was credited with “virtually all the innovations of the pre-
1908 period, including making the first story film (Life of An American Fireman) and inventing
editing as we know it.”
31
While the textbook acknowledges this erroneous chronology, there is no
mention of Guy-Blache.

France also lays claim to Germaine Dulac, another female filmmaker eclipsed by her male
contemporaries. Her 1928 film La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and The Clergyman)
was the first surrealist film ever made, though it’s been overshadowed by Luis Buñuel and
Salvador Dalí’s 1929 film An chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which Bordwell and Thompson
call “the quintessential Surrealist film.”
32
Though authorship in film had not yet penetrated French
film theory, Dulac once wrote a gentle critique to the editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française, who
mentioned the script writer Antonin Artaud, not Dulac, as the author of the La Coquille et le
clergyman.
33

What’s troubling is that women were having more success breaking into the film industry in the
1910s and early 20s then they did in 2016. In a recent report, USC Professor Stacey Smith and the
Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative at the USC Annenberg School show that in 2016,

30
David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction, 3rd Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2009), 14.
31
Bordwell & Thompson, 20.
32
Bordwell & Thompson, 164.
33
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “The Image and the Spark: Dulac and Artaud Reviewed,” Dada/Surrealism 15 (1986).
Deitch 18

women directed only 4.1% of the 800 Hollywood films analyzed by the study.
34
It’s not from lack
of interest — at the top US film schools, women and men are almost equally represented, making
up roughly 50% of the graduate student body at both USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and NYU’s
Tisch School of the Arts. However in the era of early cinema, stars like Mary Pickford, Mabel
Normand and Gloria Swanson were making more money than almost anybody in Hollywood, and
women were equally lucrative behind the camera, like celebrated screenwriter Frances Marion,
who wrote many of Mary Pickford’s most successful films, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm and The Poor Little Rich Girl.
35

The most successful women filmmaker of this era, Lois Weber, was not only a successful actress,
screenwriter, and director, but she even had her own production company, as did dozens of other
successful women.
36
Weber directed over 100 films. Around 1916 she was “the most important
director on the Universal lot.” Universal studio head Carl Laemmle said, “I would trust Miss
Weber with any sum of money that she needed to make any picture she wanted to make…She
knows the motion picture business as few people do and can drive herself as hard as anyone I have
ever known.”
37
But when she died in 1939, she was all but forgotten.

Bordwell and Thompson do not mention Lois Weber.

34
Dr. Stacy L. Smith, Dr. Katherine Pieper, and Marc Choueiti, Exploring the Careers of Female Directors: Phase
II (Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, USC Annaberg School for Communication and Journalism).
35
Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1.
36
Mahar, 1.
37
Quart, 20.
Deitch 19

One of the few books on this period, Karen Ward Mahar’s Women Filmmakers in Early
Hollywood, charts the brief co-ed landscape of early silent cinema. However, Wall Street soon
caught on to the lucrative potential of Hollywood. Once the industry became vertically integrated,
it produced a mass estrogen exodus—suddenly, now that big money was at stake, women were
seen as “unfit” to write, produce, and direct in Hollywood.
38

The brief success women once enjoyed in Hollywood comes as a shock to both scholars and casual
film buffs. Karen Ward Mahar was doing background research on actress Lillian Gish for another
project when she discovered, to her surprise, that Gish had directed a film.

Gish was not alone. Mahar calls attention to dozens of other women who have been lost to the
dustbins of history like Grace Cunard and Helen Holmes, the action heroes of their day.
39

“The film industry did a really good job of showing me that work can be masculine or feminine,
and it’s actually tweaked to the good of the corporation or industry,” said Mahar. “It’s so malleable
because [the industry] would actually emphasize that they had women when it benefitted them.
And when they wanted a different reputation, they shut them out.”
40

For Mahar, the issue is the narrow construction of men and women’s capabilities. “As soon as you
say, ‘Oh, women are better at handling personnel issues, or women are better leaders because of

38
Mahar, 2.
39
Ibid., 113
40
Karen Ward Mahar, interview by Hannah Deitch, December 9, 2016
Deitch 20

X or Y—as soon as you define that women are better at X—if you then decide you no longer need
X, the women are gone.”
41

In the 1910s, the film industry grew weary of its reputation as low-brow entertainment. Desperate
to revamp, studios produced scores of films focusing on “uplifting” socially-conscious themes.
Production companies hired more women than ever, believing old-fashioned wisdom about
women’s moral superiority.
42

Women’s brief advantage in the film industry didn’t last long. The vertical integration of the
Hollywood film industry in the late 20s coincided with the male sex-typing of directors which still
endures today.
43
All-male clubs like the Screen Club and the Motion Picture Directors’ Association
(MPDA) defined themselves as “fraternal orders.” No women were admitted with the exception
of Lois Weber, who was an “honorary member.” The male directors made it clear that “no other
of the gentler sex [would] be admitted to membership.”
44

Directors had to be the “boss” on set. For successful film director Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten
Commandments, The Greatest Show on Earth), often considered one of the founding fathers of the
film industry and indeed one of the first celebrity-directors, directing required a “dominating”
personality—a quality he believed was “rare” in men and “almost absent” in women.
45
DeMille
often wore outdoor gear to set, even while filming inside, something his own brother described as

41
Ibid.
42
Ibid., 3
43
Ibid., 8
44
Ibid., 181
45
Ibid., 196
Deitch 21

“odd.”
46
Even as sets moved indoors and retinues of assistants expanded, hyper-masculine
directors like DeMille stressed the intense physicality of the job to explain why women were unfit.
By 1927, Carl Laemmle, the same studio head who once celebrated not only Weber, but also hired
more women than any other studio, was reported as saying, “I can’t afford to bet that much money
on uncertain physical strength…I would rather risk my money on a man.”
47

“It becomes this circular thing,” said Mahar. “Capitalism is masculine, so we want somebody like
DeMille. We’re going to trust him with all this money, and when he does well that proves our
point so we keep looking for people who look like that. For a long time if you pulled someone off
the street and asked them what the cartoon of a film director was, they’d say Cecil B. DeMille. It’s
the guy with the boots and the jodhpurs and the megaphone.”
48

The masculine uniform conferred a certain amount of status and preconceptions of competence.
The lesbian filmmaker Dorothy Arzner—one of only two women filmmakers working in
Hollywood during the Classic Hollywood era of the 1920s-1960s (Ida Lupino was the other)—
also wore a suit.

The bombastic, bullish on-set behavior of directors like DeMille and Erich von Stroheim simply
was not an option for Arzner and Lupino. Arzner was known for her “non-talking direction” – she
spoke in a low voice, and was in the habit of having others shout her orders for her. In a 1936
newspaper article “Hollywood’s Only Woman Director Never Bellows Orders Herself,” the

46
Ibid., 197
47
Ibid., 197
48
Karen Ward Mahar, interview by Hannah Deitch, December 9, 2016
Deitch 22

reporter notes: “Practically all successful directors are dominant people who know how to do a bit
of outright bullying, and how. Players may not take kindly to bullying from a woman; they’d call
it nagging. And so there’s only one woman director in Hollywood.”
49

There is not even a passing mention of Arzner in Bordwell and Thompson’s textbook.

Actress Ida Lupino got into directing as a favor, after director Elmer Clifton was unable to finish
Not Wanted (1949). She went on to direct nearly a dozen films through the fifties and sixties, a
period when there were no women directing Hollywood films. Like Arzner, she could not imitate
the domineering directing style of her male counterparts. “I don’t believe in wearing the
pants…You don’t tell a man, actors, crews. You suggest to them,” said Lupino in Marjorie Rosen’s
Popcorn Venus.
50
“Let’s try something crazy here. That is, if it’s comfortable for you, love.”

Avant-garde cinema was not much kinder to women, despite the fact that the American
experimental film movement was all but launched by the pioneering filmmaker Maya Deren,
whose film Meshes in the Afternoon (1943) is one of the most widely-known in experimental
American cinema.
51

While there were other experimental films that preceded hers, “only Maya Deren publicly and
insistently proclaimed the need for a new art cinema, envisioned the conceptual and material means

49
Quart 23.
50
Quart, 23.
51
Bill Nichols, ed., Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde (University of California Press, 2001), 15.
Deitch 23

to build one, and actively saw to its implementation,” wrote Bill Nichols in the introduction to
Maya Deren and the American Avant Garde.
52

Nichols adds that some described Deren as “intimidating, threatening and ‘too aggressive,’
qualities that, in a male leader, might easily be described as compelling, relentless, and
impassioned.”
53

Deren also created a rich body of theoretical writing on film, though it’s been overshadowed by
the likes of filmmaker-theorists like Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Jean-Luc Godard,
relegating Deren to passing footnote mentions in film history courses.
54
Only women’s history
courses tend to teach Deren as the giant of the avant-garde scene that she was.

“They do this terrible thing in film scholarship where cinema is male cinema, and women’s film
is women’s film,” said Geetha Ramanathan, Feminist Auteurs author. “So there’s this strict
segregation, this women’s department thing that happens.”
55

Ramanthan is embarrassed to find that in 2016, it’s still largely true that women do not get the
same quality of attention.

52
Ibid., 5
53
Ibid., 5
54
Ibid., 7
55
Geetha Ramanathan, interview by Hannah Deitch, October 28, 2016.
Deitch 24

“Just think of how many books there are on [Fritz] Lang, for explain. When I applied for grants to
write the book on Feminist Auteurs, I didn’t get it. I looked to see who did and it was someone
writing another book on Chaplin,” said Ramanthan. “But they don’t want to hear about thirty
women filmmakers. They wanted to hear about Chaplin over again.”
56

Ramanathan says that you can look at the ten most popular texts that professors who are currently
teaching use—like the Bordwell and Thompson textbook—and you’ll find that there is almost no
female representation. She attributes this to both the professors’ training and the fact that they are
not interested.

“These intro to film courses that are taught where students learn how to read film—they’re taught
mise-en-scene, cinematography, sound editing—using all sorts of classic examples…why not
include women? Show how Arzner’s editing, or how Marleen Gorris is using sound,” said
Ramanathan.
57

She describes an anecdote with a colleague who is a fellow professor of film at the graduate level.
“One day he came and told me, ‘Oh, you know recently I saw a woman’s film that’s quite decent!’
And I said, “Oh really what?’ And he said, ‘Penny Marshall, A League of Their Own.’”
58

Just as film critics and scholars have failed the women of film history, so have the men these
women worked alongside.

56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
Deitch 25

Karen Ward Mahar describes the mistreatment of Mabel Normand—the trailblazing comedienne
of silent cinema—whose career has been outshined by Chaplin, who she once mentored.

Normand got her start at Keystone company, which was run by producer-director Mack Sennett,
who specialized in slapstick comedy. Once demand outgrew the company’s ability, Sennett created
a second production company which was entrusted to Normand. By 1913 she was directing her
own films.

“Charlie Chaplin came with his own comedic routines from the stage, but he didn’t know anything
about movies when he started,” said Mahar. “Mabel Normand co-directed with him and showed
him the ropes, and he treated her terribly.”
59

Chaplin even wrote in his autobiography that he doubted Normand’s competence as a director
because she was “only twenty, pretty and charming, everybody’s favorite.”
60
He blazed ahead and
enjoyed a brilliant career while Normand was forgotten—a recurring theme of this era.

“Many women have this moment where they’re working together at the same level as men, but the
men—even if they’re mediocre—end up forging ahead and having this career, and the women just
get left behind,” said Mahar.
61

59
Karen Ward Mahar, interview by Hannah Deitch, December 9, 2016.
60
Mahar, 112.
61
Karen Ward Mahar, interview by Hannah Deitch, December 9, 2016.

Deitch 26

+++++

The Duvernay-Treverrow Test

While the circumstances for women filmmakers in the 21st century is less bleak than it was
during Normand’s era, the difference is marginal. Let’s call it the Duvernay-Treverrow test.
Colin Treverrow and Ava Duvernay were in the same Sundance class in 2012—Treverrow made
the charming, low-budget indie comedy, Safety Not Guaranteed, while Duvernay won the Best
Director Prize for her feature, Middle of Nowhere. Despite taking home the prize, Duvernay
received no offers to direct.

Meanwhile, a project for a Martin Luther King Jr. film was currently in development at Pathé,
and going nowhere. Directors like Michael Mann, Stephen Frears, Paul Haggis, Spike Lee, and
Lee Daniels were all considered, but there was no forward momentum. Producers were prepared
to scrap it, until David Oyelowo—cast as Dr. King—wrote a letter of consideration to Pathé on
Duvernay’s behalf, citing Tom Hooper as a little-known director who was entrusted with The
King’s Speech. Finally, Pathé agreed. Unlike all the male directors, who couldn’t make the low
budget and script work—Duvernay pulled it off.
62
Selma was nominated for Best Picture at the
87
th
Academy Awards. Now Duvernay is working on an adaptation for A Wrinkle in Time for
Disney with a production budget over 100 million dollars, making her the first African American
woman in history to direct a film of that size.

62
Manohla Dargis, “Making History With ‘Selma,’ Ava DuVernay Seeks a Different Equality,” The New York
Times (December 3, 2014).
Deitch 27

Compare this trajectory with Treverrow. While Duvernay returned to her day job after Sundance,
Treverrow was fast-tracked to Hollywood blockbuster-dom. Brad Bird (director of The
Incredibles, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and Tomorrowland) told Steven Spielberg that
Treverrow “reminds me of me,” and Spielberg offered Treverrow the helm of the multi-million
dollar, Jurassic World. Replace boots and jodhpurs with a baseball cap, and you have the new
uniform of directing. But for women, mentorship from leading directors—let alone the millions
of dollars required to make a film—are simply not on the table.

Treverrow shouldn’t be singled out—he is one of many men whose successful low-budget features
somehow earned them the multi-million-dollar keys to major Hollywood franchises. Josh Trank
made Chronicle before he was offered the Fantastic Four reboot, which was a critical and
commercial failure. Marc Webb made the successful rom-com, 50 Days of Summer (you can’t help
but wonder if this would be called a ‘chick flick’ if a woman made it) before he was given The
Amazing Spider-Man. Meanwhile, Debra Granik—whose feature Winter’s Bone was nominated
for Best Picture at the Academy Awards—struggled for years to get financing for her next film.

Dee Rees made waves for her Sundance hit Pariah, but it’s taken her 12 years to get two features
made. “I look at Woody Allen’s prolific career of 30 or 40 films, and I’m watching the clock,”
said Rees in an interview with Maureen Dowd for the New York Times. “I’d love to work at a clip
of a film a year. We don’t get the benefit of the doubt, particularly black women. We’re presumed
incompetent, whereas a white male is assumed competent until proven otherwise. They just think
the guy in the ball hat and the T-shirt over the thermal has got it, whether he’s got it or not. For
Deitch 28

buzzy first films by a white male, the trajectory is a 90-degree angle. For us, it’s a 30-degree
angle.’’
63

Dowd interviews Bachelorette director Leslye Headland, who has similar qualms. “Spielberg and
Cassavetes and Woody Allen have all made some unwatchable movies,” said Headland. “But it’s
Elaine May and Ishtar you remember.”

Elaine May was the comedic partner of celebrated director Mike Nichols, and a visionary director
in her own right. She followed up critical hits like The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and Mike and Nicky
(1976) with the Warren Beatty-Dustin Hoffman buddy movie Ishtar (1987). At the time of its
release, Ishtar was widely derided for its overblown budget and reports of on-set quibbling,
earning it a reputation as one of the worst films ever made.

But its 2013 release on Blu-Ray revealed a different story. Critics from the LA Times, Slate, and
Indiewire have since come to the film’s defense. The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody called
Ishtar a “wrongly maligned masterwork.”
64
Scorsese called the film one of his all-time favorites.
Quentin Tarantino, Lena Dunham, and Edgar Wright have also publicly lauded the film. May
herself said, “If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today.”

Still, May never directed another film.

63
Maureen Dowd, “The Women of Hollywood Speak Out,” The New York Times (November 20, 2015).
64
Richard Brody, “Elaine May Talks About ‘Ishtar,’” The New Yorker (April 1, 2016).
Deitch 29

For studio executives predisposed to believe that women were too emotionally volatile to handle
a big-budget Hollywood film, Elaine May served as the punchline that proved their point.

“I really do believe that she set back the cause of women directors in Hollywood by ten
years. Those isolated moments when she could really put all else out of her mind and
concentrate on the work, she was great. But every negative notion that any male executive
might want to have how about how difficult it might be to work with a woman director was
confirmed by her: ‘She was irresponsible. She didn’t know what she was doing. She
couldn’t be controlled.’…All those things that people with conventional minds wanted to
believe – she confirmed them in spades,” said Todd McCarthy, the film critic for Variety,
in Abramowitz’s Is That A Gun in Your Pocket?
65

Because of these biases, most women directors have made films at an erratic pace. For those who
have maintained a steady pattern of work, like Sofia Coppola, critics don’t tend to treat their films
as part of a larger corpus, but rather as flights of fancy to be dismissed, or as isolated incidents.

“People who think about film seriously, whether they’re critics or scholars or serious moviegoers,
they’ll talk about ‘auteur’ directors in terms of, with Martin Scorsese, how does Silence fit into his
career as a whole? Or Brian DePalma, or those 70s guys, Spielberg, Tarantino, people feel very
comfortable looking at those movies as part of a big body of work,” said Stephanie Zacharek, film

65
Abramowitz, 83.
Deitch 30

critic for Time magazine. “But I haven’t really seen a lot of people do that with someone like Sofia
Coppola. People look down on her weirdly as a filmmaker, which I don’t understand.”
66

A quick look through the reviews for Coppola’s Marie Antoinette — her follow-up to Lost in
Translation, for which she earned a Best Director nomination at the Oscars — proves Zacharek’s
claim.

For Variety, Todd McCarthy’s review opens with the declaration that the film’s success would
depend on “its draw with teen girls and young women” — a monolithic audience, it would seem.
He wrote, “Here, as elsewhere, Coppola avoids writing, or filming, involved dialogue scenes, as
if aware she can’t pull off anything too complicated.”
67
In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane laughs
off the idea that Coppola was capturing Marie Antoinette’s inner experience: “Her what? This is
like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie.” He adds: “I spent long
periods of ‘Marie Antoinette’ under the growing illusion that it was actually made by Paris
Hilton….There are hilarious attempts at landscape, but the fountains and parterres of Versailles
are grabbed by the camera and pasted into the action, as if the whole thing were being shot on a
cell phone and sent to friends.”
68

+++++

66
Stephanie Zacharek, interview by Hannah Deitch, December 5, 2016.
67
Todd McCarthy, “Review: ‘Marie Antoinette,’” Variety (May 24, 2006).
68
Anthony Lane, “Lost in the Revolution: ‘Marie Antoinette’ and ‘Infamous,’” The New Yorker (October 23, 2006).
Deitch 31

Ad Feminam

Ad feminam is alive and well. Attacks on femininity are not merely a threat to women who dare to
pick up the camera, but also those who dare to write about film, particularly women critics who
opine on “masculine” genres.

“If you wrote about a war movie, you would invariably get some person coming in saying, ‘Listen
here little lady, you don’t know what war is like!’ And that’s not even the worst example,” said
Zacharek. “I think the worst of it has come with superhero and comic book movies.”
69

Zacharek describes receiving online death threats and comments like “she obviously needs to be
raped to be loosened up” after she wrote about The Dark Knight. More recently at the Village
Voice, Zacharek was besieged with misogynistic criticisms after she wrote a less-than-favorable
review for Guardians of the Galaxy.

“In the comments section, this one guy said, ‘Oh who cares what you think, no one wants your
dried-up pie.’” Zacharek laughed. “I was like, could you find a more vividly misogynistic way to
cut me down because I don’t like this stupid comic book movie? And that was in 2014. So fairly
recent history.”
70

69
Stephanie Zacharek, interview by Hannah Deitch, December 5, 2016.
70
Ibid.
Deitch 32

It comes as little surprise that, like every other film-related job post, men vastly outnumber women
in movie criticism. Dr. Martha Lauzen, executive director of San Diego State University’s Center
for the Study of Women in Television & Film, discovered that only 27 percent of film critics are
women. This statistical gap does not just reflect employment inequality — it also has a direct effect
on the way films about women and by women are reviewed.
71

Lauzen’s study found that only 26% of the 5,700 films reviewed had at least one female
protagonist. A third of the reviews written by women covered female-centric films, whereas only
a quarter of male reviewers looked at movies with a female protagonist. The study found that
women were not giving the female-centric films better ratings than their male colleagues, but they
were more likely to call attention to them in the first place.
72

Male critics are attuned to the need for more gender equality as well. In his New Yorker piece
“How Critics Have Failed Female Filmmakers,” Richard Brody writes,

Calling attention to their work as often and as vigorously as possible is all the more
important because the cinematic roadsides are strewn with the wreckage of major
artistic careers of independent female filmmakers of the past half century, including
Shirley Clarke, Barbara Loden, Claudia Weill, Kathleen Collins, Julie Dash, and
Leslie Harris…Critical attention is all the more important for the makers of films
that aren’t box-office hits, that aren’t widely advertised, and that don’t have the built-

71
Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, “Thumbs Down 2016: Top Film Critics and Gender” (Center for the Study of Women in
Television & Film, San Diego State University, June 2016).
72
Ibid.
Deitch 33

in publicity of celebrity actors. A review and some vigorous follow-ups can make clear
the kind of important experience that awaits, an experience that may differ
significantly from today’s mainstream but that, with the right breaks, should be
tomorrow’s.
73

Like directing, film criticism was once considered a perfectly suitable career for a woman. In the
Atlantic piece “Why Are So Few Film Critics Female?” Kate Kilkenny notes that in the 1920s
through WWII, women weren’t seen as fit to write about politics or international affairs, but they
could write about movies.
74
In the sixties, the most famous critic in America was the New Yorker’s
witty anti-auterist Pauline Kael.

But those numbers didn’t last, and even celebrities are taking notice. While promoting her film
Suffragette, Meryl Streep made headlines when she criticized the grim gender asymmetry of film
reviewers. Film is by no means alone in this regard — art, music, and book industries fail women,
too. The National Museum of Women in the Arts report that although women constitute half of
the MFAs granted in the US, only one-quarter of museum’s solo exhibitions showcase women.

Book and music reviews are similarly lacking in women’s voices. Vida, an American organization
for women in the literary arts, found that the London Review of Books, the Times Literary
Supplement, and the New York Review of Books covered more books by men than women, and
hired more men to write about them. In 2010, the LRB reviewed only 68 books by women and 195
by men. Men wrote 78 percent of the reviews. At TLS the numbers were similar — 75 percent of

73
Richard Brody, “How Critics Have Failed Female Filmmakers,” The New Yorker (January 29, 2015).
74
Katie Kilkenny, “Why Are So Few Film Critics Female?” The Atlantic (December 27, 2015).
Deitch 34

the books reviewed were by male authors, and 72 percent of its reviewers were men. The New York
Times Book Review had the best numbers: its male-female reviewer ratio was 60-40.
75

What’s odd about this phenomenon is that it’s been long confirmed by studies like the National
Endowment for the Arts’ “Reading at Risk” report that women read more than men.
76
If both
publishers and reviewers washed their hands of the outdated wisdom that men constitute more of
the market—they don’t—wouldn’t it be wiser to follow consumer logic? The movie business relies
on similarly expired assumptions that men buy more movie tickets than women, despite consistent
MPAA data than the opposite is true.
77

Hollywood has made it a priority to invest in masculinity. But the numbers simply don’t add up.

A study by the online film-financing hub Slated showed that despite the fact that women have
fewer resources and financing to make films, films produced by, written by, or starring women
tend to earn a greater return on investment.
78

Independent cinema is where the gender disparity between male- and female-centric films is most
pronounced. Low-budget female-helmed films were distributed to a third as many screens as male-
directed films at the same budget range.
79

75
“The 2015 Vida Count” (Women in Literary Arts).
76
“Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” National Endowment for the Arts.
77
MPAA Theatrical Market Statistics, 2014.
78
Rebecca Sun, “Study: Films Directed by Women Receive 63 Percent Less Distribution Than Male-Helmed
Movies,” The Hollywood Reporter (June 29, 2016).
79
Ibid.
Deitch 35

“Women are being given less money on their movies, but their returns on investment are higher
across the board,” said Slated CEO Stephan Paternot in an interview with The Hollywood
Reporter. “So people are making more money off of women’s films than they are off of men’s
films. Women are crushing it, but nobody knows this. That’s the joke. Everybody thinks if you bet
on women, you lose. But the data is saying, if you’re really in this just to make a return on your
capital, you should be betting on women.”
80

+++++

Conclusion

“Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in
collections of letters, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an
inadequate or lying language – this will become not merely unspoken, but unspeakable” – Poet
and essayist Adrienne Rich
81

At the time of publishing her famous extended essay arguing for a woman’s space in literature, A
Room of One’s Own (1929), it is likely that Virginia Woolf had not read Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
This is no fault of Woolf’s – the complete, unbowdlerized edition of Dickinson’s poems was not
available until 1955.
82

80
Ibid.
81
B. Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Movement (Duke University Press, 1998),
62.
82
Russ, 94.
Deitch 36

“Models as guides to action and as indications of possibility are important to all artists –
indeed to all people – but to aspiring women artists they are doubly valuable. In the face
of continual and massive discouragement, women need models not only to see in what
ways the literary imagination has been at work on the fact of being female, but also as
assurances that they can produce art without inevitably being second-rate or running mad
or doing without love. [….] When the memory of one’s predecessors is buried, the
assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to
be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it
before, if no woman was ever that socially sacred creature, ‘a great writer,’ why do we
think we can succeed now.
83

– Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing

The same phenomenon is true for women directors. For many female film aficionados, learning
about their pioneering female predecessors is often the prod women need to take up directing
themselves.

“For a long time I don’t think I knew that movies were made by anybody,” said Allison Anders,
director of Gas Food Lodging (1992), in an interview with My First Movie, a collection of
interviews with directors discussing their first features. “But even if I had known what a director
was, I would have assumed that I couldn’t do it because I was a girl…Movies weren’t something

83
Russ, 90-93.
Deitch 37

I ever thought I could venture into. It was still like directors were guys. I think I was probably
nineteen years old when I realized that there were some female directors like Ida Lupino.”
84

Anders condemns the facility with which her male contemporaries glide through their careers.
“You can’t sit around thinking that you’re going to get what the boys get. It’s not going to happen.
I mean, they’ve yet to call a woman filmmaker a genius. There’s always a boy wonder. There’s
always a Todd Solondz, someone they’d be just apeshit over. But they’ve yet to do that with a
girl.”

Before the author of Wuthering Heights was revealed to be a woman, the novel was hailed as
“powerful and original.” Reviewers guessed that its author was a “Yorkshire farmer or a boatman
or a frequenter of bar-rooms and steamboat saloons.”
85
How violently they overturned their
unqualified praise once it was revealed in the second edition that its author was Emily Bronte,
despite the fact that not a single letter of text had been changed.

What Russ learned at the end of her investigation into the suppression of women’s writing was
this: “There is much, much more good literature by women in existence than anyone knows.”
86

There are dozens of great films by women, waiting to be exhumed, forgotten under unmarked
graves. There are just as many that are yet to be born, their hopes dashed young, crippled by
Hollywood’s discriminatory hiring practices. In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union brought

84
Stephen Lowenstein, ed., My First Movie: Twenty Celebrated Directors Talk about Their First Film (Penguin
Books: 2002), 52.
85
Russ, 43.
86
Ibid., 122.
Deitch 38

the case to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, arguing institutional gender
discrimination.

Every single major studio faces charges.

Deitch 39

Bibliography

Abramowitz, Rachel. Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: Women's Experience of Power in
Hollywood. Random House, 2000.
Adams, Thelma. “Where’s the Beef? ‘Certain Women’ Director Kelly Reichardt Chews on Her
Unique Career.” The Atlantic, September 8, 2016.
Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction, 3rd Edition. McGraw-
Hill, 2009.
Brody, Richard. “Elaine May Talks About ‘Ishtar.’” The New Yorker, April 1, 2016.
Brody, Richard. “How Critics Have Failed Female Filmmakers.” The New Yorker, January 29,
2015.
Carr, Jay ed. The A List: The National Society of Film Critics' 100 Essential Films. Da Capo
Press, 2002.
Dowd, Maureen. “The Women of Hollywood Speak Out.” The New York Times, November 20,
2015.
Elmore, K. C. and M. Luna-Lucero. “Light Bulbs or Seeds? How Metaphors for Ideas Influence
Judgments About Genius.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, October 2016.
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “The Image and the Spark: Dulac and Artaud Reviewed.” Dada/
Surrealism, vol. 15, 1986.
Geetha Ramanathan, interview by Hannah Deitch, October 28, 2016.
Kael, Pauline. “Circles and Squares.” Film Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 3, Spring 1963.
Karen Ward Mahar, interview by Hannah Deitch, December 9, 2016.
Kilkenny, Katie. “Why Are So Few Film Critics Female?” The Atlantic, December 27, 2015.
Deitch 40

Lane, Anthony. “Lost in the Revolution: ‘Marie Antoinette’ and ‘Infamous.’” The New Yorker,
October 23, 2006.
Lauzen, Martha M. “Thumbs Down 2016: Top Film Critics and Gender.” Center for the Study of
Women in Television & Film, San Diego State University, June 2016.
Lowenstein, Stephen, ed. My First Movie: Twenty Celebrated Directors Talk about Their First
Film. Penguin Books: 2002.
Nichols, Bill ed. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. University of California Press,
2001.
Nichols, Catherine. “Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male
Name.” Jezebel, August 4, 2015.
Mahar, Karen Ward. Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. John Hopkins University Press,
2008.
Manohla Dargis, interview by Hannah Deitch, November 13, 2016.
McCarthy, Todd. “Review: ‘Marie Antoinette.’” Variety, May 24, 2006.
McMahan, Alison. Alice Guy-Blaché : Lost Visionary of the Cinema. Bloomsbury Academic,
2003.
Melissa Silverstein, interview by Hannah Deitch, November 23, 2016.
Quart, Barbara Koenig. Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema. New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1988.
Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. New York: E.P.
Dutton & Co., 1968.
Simon, Joan ed. Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer. Yale University Press, 2009.
Deitch 41

Smith, Stacy L., Katherine Pieper, and Marc Choueiti. Exploring the Careers of Female
Directors: Phase II. Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, USC Annaberg School
for Communication and Journalism.
Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell, 2001.
Stephanie Zacharek, interview by Hannah Deitch, December 5, 2016.
Sun, Rebecca. “Study: Films Directed by Women Receive 63 Percent Less Distribution Than
Male-Helmed Movies.” The Hollywood Reporter, June 29, 2016.
MPAA Theatrical Market Statistics, 2014.
Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. National Endowment for the Arts.
The 2015 Vida Count. Women in Literary Arts.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract When feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ published “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” in 1983, she outlined—with scrupulous detail and biting wit—all the ways in which women’s writing has been systematically erased or ignored from history. This thesis aims to sketch a similar inquiry for women’s filmmaking. The law is democratic—anyone can pick a camera, man or woman. So how do we map the largely invisible cultural phenomenon of suppressing women’s filmmaking? By erasing women’s contributions from textbooks, excluding them from all-male filmmaking clubs, re-branding or dismissing their work as marginal, and ignoring them in film criticism, the long and storied history of women’s filmmaking is largely unknown to mainstream culture. This thesis exhumes those women filmmakers, and uncovers how these women were buried in the first place.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Deitch, Hannah Elizabeth (author)

Core Title How to suppress women’s filmmaking

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 07/12/2017

Defense Date 03/20/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag directors,feminism,film criticism,film industry,film theory,filmmaking,Hollywood,OAI-PMH Harvest,sexism,women directors

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anawalt, Sasha (committee chair), Kun, Josh (committee member), Turan, Kenneth (committee member)

Creator Email deitch.hannah@gmail.com,deitch@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-396722

Unique identifier UC11264073

Identifier etd-DeitchHann-5502.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-396722 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-DeitchHann-5502.pdf

Dmrecord 396722

Document Type Thesis

Rights Deitch, Hannah Elizabeth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA